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Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology This is a repository copy of Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/117027/ Version: Accepted Version Article: O'Neill, Rachel (2016) Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology. Australian Feminist Studies. pp. 345-350. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2016.1157909 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Australian Feminist Studies Rachel O’Neill Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology Introduction Rachel O’Neill This Section of Australian Feminist Studies is the product of an event that took place at King’s College London in January 2015, hosted as part of the UK-based ‘Critical Sexology’ seminar series. Participants at this event – feminist scholars working across the fields of lin- guistics, cultural studies, sociology, and psychology – were invited to reflect on their encounters with evolutionary psychology (EP). As the event organiser, I was interested to prompt a discussion about how EP shapes the contours of contemporary feminist scholarship, insofar as arguments from EP are something feminist scholars continually find ourselves coming across and coming up against both within and outside the academy. Conversely, I was interested in thinking about how encounters with EP might illuminate certain limit-points in contemporary feminist theorising. The antagonisms between feminism and EP are well known and have been extensively rehearsed (see e.g. Segal 2000; Tiefer 2004). However, in recent years it has been suggested that an entente cordiale between the two fields may be emerging. In 2011, Sex Roles published a Special Issue entitled ‘Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology: Allies, Adversaries, or Both?’ In their introduction to the volume, editors Christine Smith and Julie Konik (2011) retrace the acrimonious history between feminism and EP, while also sig- nalling the possibility of a more conciliatory relationship between the two fields emerging. Elsewhere feminist scholars have placed renewed emphasis on developing both empirical rejoinders and ideological rebuttals to EP scholarship, as in the 2012 Hypatia Feminist Ethics and Social Thought (FEAST) Cluster ‘Feminist Critiques of Evolutionary Psychology’ (Meyers 2012), as well as the more recent Dialectical Anthropology Special Issue ‘Challenging Danger- ous Ideas: A Multi-Disciplinary Critique of Evolutionary Psychology’ (Grossi et al. 2014). Where these collections have, in different ways, debated the compatibility of femin- ism and EP, this Section charts an alternative trajectory. Using our own encounters with EP as a means to raise broader questions about the relationship between knowledge and poli- tics, the essays collected for this Section attempt to think through some of the following problematics. To begin, how can feminists negotiate the double complexity of evolutionary psychology as a field of academic enquiry as well as a conduit for popular assumptions about sex and gender? Can the enduring appeal of EP as an interpretative schema or framework of understanding be mapped onto broader cultural patterns? In what ways does EP, in both its scholarly and popular manifestations, contribute to the naturalisation of sexual difference that has become a defining feature of contemporary postfeminism? Are there unexamined continuities between evolutionary psychology and neoliberal rationalities, particularly with regard discourses of individualism, hierarchy, and meritoc- racy? And, in a different vein, how might the concerted opposition to EP within much feminist scholarship inhibit or impede certain kinds of theoretical innovation? On what basis might feminist scholars be able to forge more productive engagements with EP? Is it possible to counter the Australian Feminist Studies Rachel O’Neill politically contentious elements of EP while utilising the insights scholarship in this field might provide for feminist theorisations of subjectivity and relationality, affect and embodiment? Opening this Section, Deborah Cameron sketches some of the earliest engagements by feminists with evolutionary theory, beginning with feminist responses to Darwin’s The Descent of Man ([1871] 2004). She then turns to reflect on her own initial encounters with EP during the 1990s, and discusses the trajectory through which EP went from being a relatively marginal academic enterprise struggling to cast off accusations of racism and sexism, to an extremely influential field of enquiry with reach far beyond the confines of academia. Cameron describes how EP came to impinge directly on her own area of research as a feminist linguist, as assumptions about sexual difference derived from and informed by EP began to pervade both academic and popular accounts of gender and language (see also Cameron 2007, 2009). Conspicuous in this regard has been the tendency for scholarly EP to invoke popular self-help texts such as John Gray’s Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus (1992) as evidence of biologically-ordained gender differences, in direct contradiction to the wealth of research on this subject produced by linguists as well as anthropologists. Situating these developments alongside broader social and cultural shifts taking place in societies of the global north towards the end of the twentieth century, Cameron argues that the renewed intellectual and cultural authority of EP at this time can be understood as part of a wider backlash against feminism. By locating the origins of sexual difference in the past, EP lends ideological support to the postfeminist credo that women and men are naturally and properly different. In this way, the raison d’ê tre of feminism is undermined, as it is claimed that social relations between women and men are ultimately ‘subject to the laws of nature, rather than man’ (Edley and Wetherell 2001, 452). That the relationship between EP and postfeminism requires greater attention has elsewhere been noted by Suzanne Kelly, who contends that the analysis of postfeminism is crucial to understanding why EP accounts of sex and gender continue to animate the popular imaginary (2014, 288). In her contribution to this Section Ngaire Donaghue articulates an understanding of postfeminism as a cultural sensibility in which feminist concerns appear to have been ‘taken into account’, while at the same time feminism is ‘undone’ through the assumption that gender equality has already been or is in the process of being achieved (see also Gill 2007; McRobbie 2009). She explores the workings of ‘neuro-sexism’ (Fine 2010) within the undergraduate social psychology classroom and describes how assumptions about ‘hardwired’ sexual difference based in EP routinely short-circuit classroom discussions of neuroplasticity. While her students readily embrace theories of neuroplasticity to explain differences between cultural groups, they are often hesitant to engage parallel explanations in the case of sex/gender. In order to understand this hesitancy – as well as the more concerted forms of resistance such discussions often provoke – Donaghue posits that it is necessary to examine how evolutionary and neuropsychology work in tandem to create an ‘evolutionary-neuropsychology heuristic’ which frames sexual difference as simply and unavoidably biological. This heuristic is contiguous with contemporary postfeminism, as differences in the lives and experiences of women and men are understood as simultaneously ‘natural’ Australian Feminist Studies Rachel O’Neill and ‘chosen’. In this way, sexual difference comes to be seen as inevitable, and is thus rendered an ‘inappropriate target of political analysis or intervention’ (363). Donaghue’s experiences are sure to resonate with feminist scholars elsewhere, who similarly find that their class-rooms have become spaces for unexpected and perhaps unwanted encounters with EP. By elucidating the precise means by which she introduces students to alternative perspectives in order to promote more reasoned and nuanced understandings of sex/gender, she offers a valuable lesson in feminist pedagogy. In an extension of these same themes, Laura García-Favaro develops an analysis of what she terms ‘postfeminist biologism’ in the comment threads and editorial content of online women’s magazines. Examining the advice given to users concerned about their partners’ furtive pornography use, García-Favaro demonstrates how assumptions about sexual difference informed by EP pervade these discussions, as users routinely mobilise lay accounts of ‘sexual strategies theory’ and ‘parental investment theory’ to explain and justify the use of pornography among heterosexual men. In this way, EP naturalises inequality in intimate relationships by reinforcing a discourse of male immutability and female adaptation. García-Favaro’s research is consistent with arguments developed elsewhere by Martha McCaughey
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